Hartigan upbeat on media

By Clare Kermond

27 August 2010 — 3:00am

DESPITE the doom and gloom around traditional media being under attack from online competitors, News Ltd chief executive John Hartigan has delivered a very positive prediction for newspapers, arguing that news organisations have a chance to become more rather than less relevant.

Speaking at the Pacific Area Newspaper Publishers' Association's (PANPA) forum on the future of newspapers yesterday, Mr Hartigan said newspapers were facing a tipping point, with the explosion in demand for mobile devices.

He said journalism would be changed forever but that traditional newspaper publishers, far from being threatened by technology, should be capitalising on it, and newspaper proprietors, managements and editors had a responsibility to take their editorial staff on this new journey.

Mr Hartigan said the editorial stars of this new age would be those who were innovative, creative and entrepreneurial.

They would be the ones who:

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■ Really understood what their audiences wanted.

■ Knew how to exploit the new technology.

■ Could put the two together to create and publish content for which people would pay.

Mr Hartigan said that media organisations, instead of assuming that their scale and market power was unassailable, had to start thinking like entrepreneurial start-ups.

Also speaking at the PANPA forum, Ross Dawson, who wrote about social networking and microblogging in his 2002 book Living Networks, predicted that journalism would be ''increasingly crowdsourced'' to ''hordes of amateurs overseen by professionals''.

He said ''higher-skilled'' journalists could add value to information supplied by the public, such as people who witnessed a key event.

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Mr Dawson also said media organisations should also look at building value by creating stronger connections with the communities of people who read their products.

Mr Dawson tipped that within a decade mobile reading devices that allowed people to consume news on the go would be the ''primary news interface''.